Ensnared (The Accidental Billionaires #1)
J. S. Scott
PROLOGUE
JADE
Five months ago . . .
“Just a few more minutes, Ms. Sinclair,” the secretary informed me as she hung up the phone. “Mr. Stone is running somewhat behind today.”
Somewhat behind?
I’d been waiting for close to an hour. I’d pretty much read every magazine in the waiting room from cover to cover, even the articles I wouldn’t normally bother to read. Did women really want to know how to attract a man, or how to get the attention of one of them who didn’t want to be with her?
Pretty weird articles, really. Or was I the one who didn’t really understand? Judging by my not-so-exciting dating life, maybe I should have paid more attention to all those women’s magazines. I didn’t exactly have men beating down my door to go out with me. But then, it had always been that way.
Can I have a dating slump when I never really had an incredible dating life in the first place?
Because of work and school, I hadn’t been able to try out a lot of different guys, and to be honest, they hadn’t wanted to date me, either. I’d made one major mistake in college. I had to either blame that one on complete exhaustion and stress, or admit to myself that I’d let somebody use me for two years.
I preferred the former excuse.
I don’t really want to attract a guy who doesn’t notice me the first time he meets me.
Wasn’t there supposed to be some kind of spark, some unknown recognition that somebody was my soulmate? And wouldn’t they realize it, too?
I certainly hope so, otherwise I’m waiting for something that’s never going to happen.
Unfortunately, thanks to the score of women’s magazines in the room, I now knew how to get a man who didn’t want me, and what the moon and stars had in mind for my future mate, according to the horoscopes.
Maybe the article about improving my orgasms would have been useful if I had any, but I could have skipped the piece on giving a guy a better blow job.
Not exactly something I’d normally peruse, but I’d had an hour to kill, and after I’d read the interesting stuff like National Geographic, I’d still had time on my hands, so I’d pushed my way through the women’s magazines, too.
I was pretty sure I wasn’t better off because I was now armed with the wisdom on how to deal with a commitment-phobic male, and I was getting restless.
I smiled and nodded at the secretary politely from my seat in the plush outer office of billionaire and business mogul Eli Stone. It wasn’t the elderly assistant’s fault that her boss had left me waiting for way longer than anybody should have to wait for a scheduled appointment, even with a billionaire.
I’m a billionaire, too. Isn’t there some kind of unspoken courtesy thing among the megarich? Does one billionaire leave another one waiting for an hour to see them?
Unfortunately, I hadn’t been rich long enough to know the rules.
Mr. Stone had a net worth a lot higher than mine, but once somebody reached billionaire status, did it really matter?
I dropped the last magazine I’d finished on the table with a sigh.
I’m completely out of reading material, even the ridiculous stuff.
I tapped my foot impatiently, wondering if this was the way billionaires treated each other.
Truth was, I’d only been a billionaire for a matter of months, and I still had no idea what I was supposed to do with my newfound wealth. To be honest, all my money and investments terrified the hell out of me. I was a science-and-wildlife geek. Ask me any question about conservation or animal behavior, and I could go on for hours. But I had no idea what to do with a fortune.
I only knew how to live poor, so I was basically paralyzed with fear every time I glanced at my bank account and my investment portfolio. I knew I should be happy, but for some unknown reason, I wasn’t.
Through an accident of birth, and because of the father I’d never known, I’d suddenly become one of the richest women in the world. I was now a wealthy and powerful Sinclair.
Well, I’d always been a Sinclair, but the wealthy part of it—not so much. Never in a million years would I have guessed that I was related to the super-rich Sinclairs on the East Coast.
Me, my twin sister, Brooke, and my brothers, Noah, Seth, Aiden, and Owen, had gone from being dirt poor our entire lives to having more money than God because we’d discovered that our father had been a bigamist. My father was a man who had acquired two wives and two separate families on opposite coasts.
My siblings and I had kind of gotten the bad part of that deal. Well, financially, anyway.
It’s not that I wasn’t grateful that the East Coast Sinclairs had found our family on the West Coast. My half brother Evan had brought us all together as one very large family. But our inheritance, which had made me and all of my siblings ridiculously wealthy, was still something I just wasn’t used to.
I’d invested the majority of my legacy with Evan’s help, and he still assisted me by managing my overwhelming portfolio, even though all of my half brothers and my half sister were on the East Coast. He’d set up my money to make more money, and I sometimes got dizzy watching it grow. And that was pretty much all I did. I watched my fortune increase every single day. I felt too intimidated by all those zeros to do anything else.
Unlike my brothers, I didn’t much care if the money continued to multiply, and I didn’t have big plans like they did.